Ivan Drago – Rocky IV (1985)
“Whatever he hits, he destroys.” Dolph Lundgren is a fearsome sight in Rocky IV; a sweaty, dead-eyed killing machine with rippling muscles and a peroxide flat-top. In the most adventurously-scripted of all of Stallone’s boxing films he played the seemingly bionic Ivan Drago, a Soviet Olympic champion and infantry captain whose punches are said to be more than twice as punishing as the average heavyweight. 1980s dot-matrix computer read-outs didn’t lie, you see.
Where do you even start with Drago’s villain qualities? There’s his wife Ludmilla (Brigitte Nielsen), an Olympic gold medalist herself and as a ruthless Svengali speaking on his behalf, explaining away the PED allegations with the kind of excuses that would make Lance Armstrong laugh. Drago’s a greased-up robot (the body oil itself should have got an Oscar nod to be honest), silently and emotionlessly dispatching his opponents with those 1800 psi haymakers. As far as cinematic one-two punches go, no moment is better than when in that deep monotone he warns “I must break you” before punching Balboa’s gloves with such force that the champ almost keels over.
The Cold War setting makes Rocky IV the cheesiest but also probably the most fun of the Rocky films, a Soviet cliché bingo card as blockbuster movie. Drago also gets the most heartless and impactful line of the entire Rocky franchise (and he only has four in the entire film) after he beats swaggering Apollo Creed to a pulp and his vanquished opponent is lying flat on the canvas. “If he dies, he dies.” We all know it doesn’t end so well for him but nobody has ever looked or sounded more intimidating in a sports movie than Ivan Drago.
Shooter McGavin – Happy Gilmore (1996)
Are Adam Sandler films mostly terrible? Certainly, though not quite as bad as people make out, especially the earlier ones. Chris Farley belts it out of the park as the creepy, hot-tempered bus driver in Billy Madison (“No, but you could imagine what it’d be like if they did, right?”) and though Happy Gilmore now sits firmly within Anchorman territory for films most heinously over-quoted by that guy in the office that everyone secretly despises, it actually holds up reasonably well by cheapo sports movie standards.
Central to the ongoing appeal of Happy Gilmore is Shooter McGavin, the hot-shot tour pro who quickly establishes himself as the film’s force of darkness. Shooter is a boastful, cheating, passive-aggressive, third-person-talking, caddy-firing, cigar-smoking, Ivy League-educated sore loser. The only way his character could have been more ‘golf’ is if he’d been named Shooter McGavin III.
You’d have to say that a key to Shooter’s longevity is the casting; does any actor look, move and sound more like a veteran golfer than Christopher McDonald? The man might actually have been born in a polo shirt and chinos. Mis-timed and mangled dad joke zingers roll off his tongue (“I eat pieces of shit like you for breakfast”) and surely nobody could ostentatiously blow the air out of a finger pistol with the same arrogant, ham-acting panache as McDonald.
At this point it’s unlikely that McDonald will ever do anything as memorable as Happy Gilmore, though his role as a Jerry Springer-style TV host in an early-2000s Peter Gabriel video was certainly a hell of a lot weirder. I bet people still stop him in the street every single day and quote Happy Gilmore lines at him. Just imagine those awkward encounters, McDonald politely giving them what they want before walking off muttering under his breath, much like Shooter himself might.
Shooter is at his best and funniest when he’s embodying the indignation and snobbery of the golf establishment. “I saw two big, fat, naked bikers in the woods off 17 having sex,” he bristles at one point. “How am I supposed to chip with that going on Doug?”
Johnny Lawrence – The Karate Kid (1984)
In my mind, every American school bully of the 1980s must have been just like Johnny Lawrence, the red-jump-suited, headband-wearing nemesis of Daniel LaRusso in The Karate Kid. This kid was mean. He was a bit unhinged. He’d beat you up for fun, steal your lunch money and throw it down a drain as you writhed in agony. Johnny doesn’t need your money. He’s got rich parents and gets about town on a dirtbike.
I hardly need to explain that Johnny was a practitioner of ‘Cobra Kai’, which Wikipedia now earnestly describes as “an unethical and vicious form of karate”. In more anecdotal terms, when your sensei is threatening to beat up old men you know that the dojo means business. Even when Sylvester Stallone and Pele took on the Germans in Escape to Victory the opposition didn’t seem as nasty as the Cobrai Kai and Johnny Lawrence was their poster boy, the sandy-haired alpha dog with a chip on his shoulder and a penchant for devastating fly kicks.
There’s probably an argument to be had that Cobrai Kai sensei John Kreese was the central figure of evil in The Karate Kid – and as per the geriatric-bashing threat and yearning to see teenage boys injure each other he certainly was both deeply weird and bad to the bone – but even as the unquestioning lapdog have you ever wanted to snot a movie character as much as you wanted to snot Johnny Lawrence? To successfully roundhouse Johnny would surely feeling like double-dacking the devil himself.
Who just needlessly shoves a ghetto blaster into someone’s chest when they’re trying to chill out at the beach? Johnny Lawrence, that’s who. Johnny Lawrence and his arrogant, sneering, punchable face.
White Goodman – Dodgeball (2004)
Moving in the opposite direction as the earlier appraisal of Happy Gilmore, Dodgeball is far too fondly remembered in the sports comedy canon. It’s just a bit rubbish, in fact. The one saving grace is Ben Stiller’s manic, scene-stealing turn as bad guy White Goodman, multimillionaire owner of Globo Gym, purveyor of haughty air-quotation marks, wearer of metallic spandex and vigorous enjoyer of food-based sexual fetishes.
White’s a trust-fund brat, a mugging employee-relations cowboy (“There’s no reason we need to be shackled by the strictures of the employee-employer relationship. Unless of course you’re in to that sort of thing. In which case I’ve got some shackles out the back”) and an unchecked megalomaniac with self-portraits hung on every available wall. “Yeah, it’s me taking the bull by the horns,” he boasts. “It’s a metaphor. But that actually happened though.”
Stiller’s great gift is physical comedy and even now I find myself laughing at something as simple as the way he’s dwarfed by his team as he parades around in front of them like a spandex-clad dodgeball Napoleon, introducing his own personal “fitness consigliore”. It’s about the asinine one-liners too. “Nobody makes me bleed my own blood.”
Jean Girard – Talladega Nights (2006)
“We invented democracy, existentialism and the blow job.” Not many sports movie bad guys have made better entrances than Frenchman Jean Girard, nemesis to Will Ferrell’s Ricky Bobby’s in Talladega Nights. Like all great ‘foreign’ bad guys in sports films, Sacha Baron Cohen did a quite superb job affecting the most ludicrous accent imaginable for the character, a jazz-loving, crepe-eating (“they are really thin pancakes, it’s just a French word for them”), macchiato-drinking ‘Formula Un’ champion.
The great thing about Girard and Talladega Nights is the way both go so ludicrously over-the-top with the absurdist improvisation that they get away with skewering all of the NASCAR scene, US cultural imperialism and the south in particular. The interplay between Girard and Bobby crackles along with one-liners throughout. “Do you know why I came to America, Monsieur Bobby?” he asks at one point. “Health care systems, giants water parks – the same reason everyone comes to America,” snaps back his rival.
Clubber Lang – Rocky III (1982)
Yes, I’m going with two villains from the same film franchise and no, I’m not going with Apollo Creed because he spent too long being a good guy to qualify. How can Carl Weathers be the bad guy? There’s a contradiction at play here too; Rocky III is by some distance the most ludicrous and downright terrible film of the series and the point at which it could have been curtains for the whole operation. The sight of feature film debutant Mr T in a boxing ring is the sight of a Shark being jumped. But, at the same time T’s character still qualifies as a great sports movie villain. How can you not include a guy named Clubber?
Rocky III at least had a winning premise. The world-beating lead character had gone from the hunter to the hunted so naturally, a brash young upstart was due on the scene. In came loud-mouthed, trash-talking Clubber, just a little too inseparable from Mr T himself with the trademark hair and the swagger but a pretty mean specimen in those black trunks of his, with ‘Clubber’ across the waistband. Pure Oakland Raiders, as was the brutal knock-out in the film’s first fight.
The first time I watched Rocky III, as Clubber’s final-round haymakers in the re-match started getting slow-motion treatment and natural disaster sound effects, I actually convinced myself that Rocky might lose again. “Knock me out. C’mon, knock me out. C’mon, harder!” he screams at one point. Alas, for all his rippling muscle and brute power, Clubber seemed to suffer from a comically short reach and you’re never going to beat Rocky racing around the ring after him like it’s Le Mans.
Clubber really has his moments. He gives Mickey a heart attack and gratuitously hits on Adrian too but his great villain trait is the volume and quality of his trash talk. “I don’t need no has-been messin’ with my corner,” he barks at Apollo Creed before Balboa-Lang Volume 1. The only crime Rocky’s right-hand man had committed was to walk across to the young fighter and wish him well. “C’mon Creed, c’mon!” Poor Apollo. He looked like he was watching his house burn down.
Related: if the first Rocky film was released today with the exact same script, I’d be willing to bet that Rocky himself would be the villain in the eyes of the pop culture blogosphere. That condescending, hypothetical-slut-shaming pow-wow he has with Little Marie? The way he aggressively bullies Adrian into dating him? Ouch. And while we’re getting down on Rocky, the third film is single-handedly responsible for the popularisation of Survivor’s Eye of the Tiger, a crime for which Stallone can never be forgiven.
